unhomogenized zen, babbling

Category Archives: poetry

It’s turned colder over the past several days following a late January warm spell. The creek still trickles, but less each day. The Great Horned Owl still calls before sunrise. As I sit in the barn zendo bundled with double blankets and thick ski gloves against the 10 degree cold, there are these two sounds. Then the owl at some point quiets. Then the only accompaniment to the breath in this belly is the creek and the closeness of the cold. Then there is only this belly pushing up and out and then falling, sometimes as smoothly as water sliding over clear ice and sometimes falling in small fits and starts like a leaf carried downstream, occasionally caught in eddies or bumping into rocks. This breath also will quiet for good some day. The belly will rise no more. The cycle interrupted. Who can say when? You might as well try to predict that magical moment when moving water turns to still ice. For now the breath is the center and all else in the world exists only when given attention, like satellites attracted or inhaled, then let go or exhaled by the inconstant gravity of the mind.

From the dark earth
freshly-formed mushrooms emerge
Young Red-tailed hawk squeaks:
“Feed me!”
The mockingbird answers:
“Feed yourself”, in its hawkiest voice
Old/new water now tickles
the weeds in the stream
Emerging from the musty barn zendo
what may appear humdrum
is athrum with nowness

each moment, a choice
from the chaotic menu:
fuckworkhelpeatcaketvrun
how to live with oneself?
that shame-filled gargantuanity
then to stop, breathe, be here
where the questions beat themselves
senseless against the cliff
of insignificance

Walking the power line cut
through dormant scrub oak and sweet fern
the shaly terrain full of briars and ticks
and there you are:
Trailing Arbutus, ephemeral harbinger of the season
Your prostrate form, tiny white flowers, and simple evergreen leaves
adorning this bleak scene.
Am I the only person who will see you?
Appreciate your brave arrival in this not-yet-Spring-time?

And beauty?……
Is it a thing out There?
Mere perception?
Do other creatures feel some difference in the wind or humidity?
Do they revel in the minute changes on the mountain?
Perhaps for them beauty is just
flitting, crawling, eating, mating
Being

Before morning, we knew where the sun would rise
At midday, how high in the sky.
At dusk, over which hill it would set.
Then , which star would be first to wake up,
where and when the moon would appear
and in which guise.

We knew that when shadows are longest
still the sun creeps northward
twig by twig, each day
as it rises anew in the southeastern sky.
We knew the startling hoot of the great horned owl
would come one moon before
the “phoebee” call of the chickadee,
and the phoebee call one moon before
the sap would drip from broken maple branches.
We may have dreaded cold-hearted winter then
but the return of the light was not in doubt